AMD R9 and R7 GPUs: A bold new direction for 2014 that uses old rebadged chips from 2012

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AMD’s new Radeon family of GPUs have launched, with a new set of products, a new brand strategy, long-term plans for the Mantle API, a new hardware audio acceleration engine, and, oddly enough, fundamentally the same GPU core that has powered the company’s graphics cards since 2012.

Historically, GPU enthusiasts aren’t very thrilled with rebrands, but the concept of what does or doesn’t qualify is somewhat dicey. On the grand scale, the R7 260, R9 270X, and R9 280X are all rebadged parts — but that doesn’t mean they don’t include new features.

The new family of R7 and R9 cards are all rebrands of already existing products, with a few new spins and a new feature tucked in here and there. The reason for the rebrand is simple: The old HD family has run out of numbers. The 2000 – 7000 series were used from 2007 to the present day, the 8000 (OEM only) cards are already taken, which leaves just the 9000 before a new set of figures were necessary. AMD has decided to make the jump now, with a combination of models and three-digit numbers.

The “R7” denotes relative ranking within the family, meaning that an R9 should always be faster than an R7. The next three digits are the model — AMD is starting with the 200 series, so an R7 260 is faster than an R7 250. Then there’s the “X”. Theoretically, the “X” cards are faster than non-X cards. Right now, that’s still true. In the future, AMD will have to design things carefully to prevent customers from becoming confused over whether or not a theoretical R7 280X is faster than an R9 260X. Careful brand segmentation will help here.

What’s new

The 200 family isn’t an exact clone of the 7000 series, even if the fundamental GPU at the heart of the equation is unchanged. Fresh on deck is additional display flexibility — the Radeon 7000 family could only drive two HDMI/DVI displays simultaneously, the third was required to be DisplayPort. Now, you can drive three identical monitors off HDMI/DVI, thanks to new board and firmware tricks that share a clock signal under these conditions. If you’re mixing and matching across monitor types (and to be fair, we really recommend not doing that), you won’t be able to take advantage of this capability.

Tiling displays is another new feature of the new series. The new cards will support 4K resolutions in Eyefinity via VESA Display ID 1.3, which allows for a configuration that’s much simpler and easier to configure from a single DisplayPort. This appears to be an Eyefinity configuration point which means it’ll be enabled in Catalyst drivers and should come to the HD 7000 family as well, though AMD isn’t clarifying on that point yet. The R9 290X will be capable of driving a full 3860×2160 image from a single display stream at some point in the future.

One of the major new features that AMD talked up at its Hawaii event was the introduction of a new TrueAudio hardware acceleration system. Sure enough, that’s coming — but only to the R9 290X (the genuinely new architecture that hasn’t launched yet) and the rebadged Radeon 7790, now known as the R7 260X. That means that yes, the Radeon 7790 launched with this capability from day one, and we simply never knew about it. It also means that TrueAudio, for all its interesting potential features and capabilites, isn’t going to come out on the “new” higher end cards.

That’s… a sub-optimal decision for any attempt to push a genuinely new technology, but it’s early days. Maybe AMD is planning a full card refresh in the not-too-distant future that’ll fix this capability, top-to-bottom. Even so, TrueAudio looks interesting, from a technical perspective. AMD has integrated a Tensilica HiFi EP DSP into the GPU die, with 32K of on-board cache RAM, 8KB data caches, and a TrueAudio API that’ll be available for maximum offload and processing.

The barriers to this kind of adoption are ultimately based in getting developers to target it and PC owners to build sound rigs that take advantage of it. The former may be helped by Sony and Microsoft; the custom audio hardware is virtually certain to be built into the Xbox One and PS4. Getting the PC side up to snuff, however, could take some time. In the past, hardware audio generally foundered after Vista launched because the Windows Vista/7/8 audio model disallows the kind of 3D audio offload that was present in early cards from Creative and Aureal. Realtek and the entire concept of “good enough” took over the PC market — today, truly high-end audio is fractional, and generally limited to people doing high-end professional work.

Of course this has generally limited what audio processing can do for gaming, because the time slice allocated to the CPU for audio is relatively small, and audio itself must be integrated at very low latencies in order to synchronize with what’s on-screen. AMD’s TrueAudio is meant to change that and bring a new level of sophistication to the system if the company can drive adoption.

Finally, there’s price. These new cards are launching at $300 (R9 280X aka 7970), $200 (R9 270X, aka Radeon 7870), and $140 (R7 260X, aka Radeon 7790). That’s substantially lower and less confusing than AMD’s current product series, which is rather a mess of 7950s, 7850s, and a number of other products. So simplifying things for consumers can technically be called a feature, if you’re willing to squint.

Tagged In

This almost exactly mirrors the GTX700 series launch. Move all the cards lower down, and add two new cards(Titan/GTX780) to the top that are basically just enlarged versions of previous top end cores with the same architecture). Presumably this was brought on by the lack of a new transistor node being ready(Although the 28nm node Hawaii/VI is on is much denser than the 28nm used for SI) and the global recession.

There are also two new cards entered to the bottom of the list, but people are obviously less interested in these parts.The R7 240 and R7 250 are both based on the Oland chip. Cards similar to the R7 250 were launched relatively recently under the HD8000 series but as OEM parts only.

Joel Hruska

Well, the principle difference between the two is that the GTX 700 series bumped clock speeds more (though boost clocks have been adjusted for these cards) and NV didn’t make such a huge play around the GTX 760 / 770. The GTX 780, yes, but that was still at trimmed-down Titan.

The two things I’m not fond of are the lack of a Never Settled bundle and the TrueAudio compatibility bits. But otherwise, it’s a moderate refresh with a lot of talk on top to emphasize Mantle and other important bits.

Okimdone

Never Settled bundle is still there

Joel Hruska

Never Settled Forever is, I think, still HD 7000 only.

Singh1699

I think if mantle pans out, people not aware of the re-brand or new buyers may not care. I’m def. looking forward to it, it’s about time the 7970 hit $300.

Now you can tell people to OC a $300 AMD card to have almost same perf. as a $1000 Nvidia one lol.

Protagonist66

What? So you can OC 7970 about 35% and change architecture? Oh yea and Titan is also able to OC.. None of AMD cards are even close to Titan’s single core performance. Yes it’s very expensive but it’s for professional use only.

I’m personally waiting for next Nvidia release and see what it does to prices cause I prefer quality of Nvidia over AMD’s cheap prizes.

Protagonist66

What? So you can OC 7970 about 35% and change architecture? Oh yea and Titan is also able to OC.. None of AMD cards are even close to Titan’s single core performance. Yes it’s very expensive but it’s for professional use only.

I’m personally waiting for next Nvidia release and see what it does to prices cause I prefer quality of Nvidia over AMD’s cheap prizes.

Okimdone

780 and titan aren’t an enlargement. It’s the GK110 chips over the GK104(600 series and <770) chips which is from the Quadro line. The titan being the equivalent of a K6000…A $6000 professional GPU.

tgrech

GK110 is the same Kepler architecture that GK104 is based on, just with more cores and some added features(Many of which were fused off for the consumer orientated parts). This makes GK110 to GK104 pretty much the same as Hawaii to Tahiti, same architecture at heart, but a lot more of it. Hawaii uses a slightly modified GCN architecture, but with a denser process node and larger die size to fit more cores on and a few more features.

But these sorts of features are of interest to a relative handful of developers and GPGPU compute developers. For gamers, GK110 is Fat Kepler. And it’s a great chip, make no mistake. But AMD, with Hawaii, has taken exactly the same approach to the core GPU architecture. The difference is that they’ve added consumer capabilities like TrueAudio, whereas Nvidia added workstation / compute capabilities instead.

Phobos

That is one bitching looking video card, I like the looks of it.

pelov lov

These are the ramifications of the screeching halt of Moore’s law.

Two years ago nVidia mentioned that the processes following TSMC’s 28nm would look much less desirable and come more slowly, and that’s looking to be spot on. Both AMD and nVidia jumped on 28nm early and suffered through poor yields and high pricing (nVidia’s yields were worse than AMD’s due to GK104’s TDP-to-clock requirements). So nVidia waited with the GK110 die until yields and pricing was lower in order to release Titan. The R9 290X looks to be AMD’s ‘waiting game’ response.

Rebadging + renaming has happened many times before, but with processes being tuned for mobile first it’s likely going to get even worse – TSMC’s and GloFo’s HPP processes will lag behind HPm and low-power SoC. I reckon it’s going to be a lot more waiting between actual new products and even more waiting between the lower end models and the flagship cards.

The lack of TrueAudio is really disappointing, but AMD seems to think it wasn’t worth a new die + the cost of a new mask ($5-$10mil?). I still have fond memories of WinXP-era sound processing and sound cards. Ye Olden Days of when you were actually able to tell the location of the triggered sound .wav :P

Joel Hruska

Pelov,

I’ve played games like Dishonored, and had absolutely no trouble with positional audio. It may be that devs haven’t bothered much in a number of titles. (I loved hardware audio back in the day, and bought a Diamond Monster M300 for the superior Aureal 3D solution).

Singh1699

I don’t understand how people think realtek is good enough. I have a gigabyte p67-ud4-b3 and the chip on it would hiss and combine channels.

A Xonar dg that was like $12 after rebate, cleaned everything up and has been music to my ears.

Funily enough, a $40 pair of Pansaonic studio headphones (htf-600) sounds better than the Audio technicha I got slightly used that I though would sound better. :(

I’m actually hoping these don’t last forever so I can get back to those.

—

I’d say as far as sound goes, xonar dg + panasonic htf is the best 50-60 you’ll spend (depending on rebates). Def. diminishing returns afterward because everything high end seems to be clasical music oriented and doesn’t clamp to your head for good bass like the panasonic.

Btw, Joel do you know headphones like the pannys with good midrange? I remember a lot of bass bleeding into the mids on them though.. :(

Justin

Joel – thanks again as always!

CatheyBarrett

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CatheyBarrett

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steve smith

Comical, Nvidia re-badges and no one batters an eye lid, AMD does it and its suddenly blasphemy. Also “it seems like even the R9 290X won’t bring a new architecture to the table — it’ll just be an enlarged Tahiti core” Hawaii is based on GCN 2.0, if it was just an enlarged Tahiti core, you would need a nuclear reactor to power it. Clueless…..

calical26

amd is smart to change driver in the game to work way better dx and openCL in games are a bottleneck now dumb ass microsoft drm program amd is getting ready to make that switch to linux very smart

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